The political class has been rumbled

Monday 12 October 2009 08:01 BST

Just when you think the match is over, it turns out there's a second leg: or, in this case, Legg.

As a welcome back to the House of Commons this week, MPs are receiving letters from the head of the official inquiry into the expenses scandal, Sir Thomas Legg, alerting them individually to his findings and giving them three weeks to challenge the verdict.

After the high octane hoopla of the conference season, the political class will be reminded en masse that they have been rumbled, they are not going to get away with it and everybody hates them. As Nigel Molesworth would put it, our MPs are "Back in the Jug Agane".

It is expected that Sir Thomas will demand explanations from more than half of all MPs - more than 325 - and one can imagine the spectrum of response that will now follow: ranging from pin-striped outrage, to epic squirming, to wobble-lipped pleas for forgiveness on television.

Money will be repaid and resignation letters tendered.

Behind the scenes, there will be little true contrition. Most MPs feel they have already paid a heavy price in personal reputation, collective honour and (in many cases) cash afterthe Telegraph's original investigation.

At the Tory conference in Manchester last week, the normally lucid wife of one MP suddenly turned into an Alan Bennett care home character, as she contemplated the fresh torments that lay ahead: "I mean here we go again, I mean here we go again, I mean here we go again" etc etc.

The truth is that the Parliament elected in 2005 is broken, bust beyond repair, and no amount of punishment or recompense or self-abasement will fix it.

The best we can hope for is a few good surrealist gags of the sort provided by Lord Paul in yesterday's Sunday Times.

Although the Upper House has not been included in Sir Thomas's audit, its members have provided plenty of material for a future investigation.

Asked why he had claimed £38,000 for a flat he had never used, Lord Paul said: "I don't say that I stayed the night - I said that it was available to me." On which basis: I didn't actually stay at Claridge's while writing this article, I grant you, but a suite was doubtless "available" to me. Should I file an expenses claim for a night in the hotel to the Editor of the Evening Standard? I mean, it seems only fair. Doesn't it?

The "closure" for which parliamentarians long so keenly will not come this side of a general election. Most political stories fade quite quickly.

The trouble with the expenses saga is that, like a sustained release vitamin tablet, it is a gift that keeps on giving.

The details have been so riveting (duck houses, moats), so risible (claims for nappies and Jaffa Cakes), and so infuriating (the practice of "flipping", the evasion of capital gains tax).

Each new revelation has dramatised the aloofness of the political class and sharpened the sense of a divide between MPs and those they represent. We pay for our groceries, our cleaners and our home improvements. They don't.

Worse than that: they get us to pay for them. "We're all in this together," was the Tory mantra last week. To which many voters doubtless replied: Could have fooled us, Dave.

That said, Cameron was much quicker than Gordon Brown to grasp the sheer scale of what had happened and the necessity to take swift and sometimes condign action against his own MPs.

The Tory leader saw, and said explicitly, that it was not just the rules that mattered, but the breach of their spirit: a breach that had spawned a devastating impression of dishonesty, avarice and even, in a few cases, outright embezzlement.

At his own party conference in Brighton, the PM went through the motions ("just as I have said that the market needs morals I also say that politics needs morals, too").

But Brown revealed that he still does not understand both the enormity and the smallness of the problem when he scorned Cameron's call for belt-tightening at the Commons.

"What was the latest thing?" the PM said in a New Statesman interview last month. "The cost of food in the House of Commons?"

It says so much about Brown in his final months in office that he should sneer about such a proposal.

The state of his eyesight, deteriorating or otherwise, should not be an issue. His political blindness most certainly is.

The Tories will enter the election campaigning on the ghastly financial deficit they will inherit. But the political deficit coming their way may be even more damaging.

To save and reform a nation requires trust in the political process, and plenty of it; it requires a belief that politicians, as a breed, are not only up to the task, but in it for our benefit, not theirs. Right now, the default position for most voters is to assume the worst.

In the months ahead, the Legg Inquiry, which still has much work to do, will compound that dark suspicion.

"Let me make something clear," said Cameron of the expenses scandal in Manchester, "this is not over." Of that, as we shall see again this week, there is no doubt.